


The Unknown Country

by prairiecrow



Category: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Impending Death, Loss, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-09
Updated: 2012-04-09
Packaged: 2017-11-03 08:37:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/379436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prairiecrow/pseuds/prairiecrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hobby doesn't know if he can bear losing what he loves yet again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Unknown Country

**Author's Note:**

> Set after the end of the movie.

Beyond the balcony's ornate metal railing the Atlantic spread to the dim horizon, cold and grey on this sunny spring afternoon, restless and jealous of its secrets. The faint roar of its constant motion as it circled the decaying towers of the drowned city rose to Allen Hobby's ears but made no impression upon him: he had been hearing it almost every day for the past fifteen years, after all. His attention was instead focussed on his companion — or rather, on what was left of him.  
  
Hobby was bundled up against the chill in thick pants and an insulated jacket, but Joe had no need of such comforts. He sat on the bench beside Hobby just as the techs had arranged him there an hour or so earlier, clad in a light suit of pale grey and a shirt of white silk: spine straight, shoulders poised, one hand arranged on the arm rest and the other on his own thigh, his face serenely turned toward the vast waters that had swallowed something that meant more both to him and to Hobby than anything else in the wide and weary world. His green eyes, bright as jewels, were unblinking — they had never blinked, of course, but now the alert intelligence that had once quickened their depths had retreated deep within, beyond all of Hobby's considerable powers to recover. He was still beautiful, like a statue crafted from silk and ebony and jade, but the qualities of personality that Hobby had learned to treasure had faded with the deterioration of his mechanical mind.  
  
If Joe had been orga, Hobby would have said that he was dying of grief. But he was mecha, and such terms should have had no meaning in that paradigm.  
  
And yet, turned to face him now, looking into those gorgeous eyes that had not seen him in over five days, Hobby knew in his heart that this was exactly what was happening.   
  
"You're following him, aren't you?" He spoke barely above a whisper, aware that the mecha's hearing was as sensitive as a cat's and that his gentle words were reaching Joe's mind… or rather, whatever was left of it. He reached out to stroke his hand carefully over that slick black cap of artificial hair, watching the ripple of discordant color — blond, brown, distressed silver — trail the pressure his fingers like oil on dark water. "You're following David into the depths, where I can't find either of you."   
  
Joe did not answer. He was beyond that now. And Hobby bowed his head and closed his eyes, biting back the sting of traitorous tears.  
  
********************************  
  
It had been only six and a half months since the child-mecha named David, after Hobby's own dear dead son, had set out on its final journey — and run into a lover-mecha along the way, a tall dark robot framed for murder and fleeing to save his artificial hide. Together they'd had quite an adventure, questing for the elusive Blue Fairy until David had slipped beneath the waves of the Atlantic in a stolen amphibicopter and left Gigolo Joe behind to carry in his sleek head detailed recordings, both audio and video, of their last shared hours. Hobby had poured over those records again and again in the days following David's disappearance, trying relentlessly, and then desperately, to understand — but in the end he'd been forced to admit that he was faced with two ineffable mysteries, one not entirely unexpected (for David had been designed to be a mecha of an entirely different order, an exponential leap beyond current mental simulation technology) and one utterly perplexing (for Joe was an LX-9, an older model with well established parameters of function, and yet…)  
  
… and yet he displayed behavioural aberrations that, upon closer examination of his process paths, Hobby could only attribute to a rudimentary feedback process that had arisen as a result of some untraceable quirk of his manufacture or his programming. Unlike every other mecha of his line — indeed, unlike any other mecha extant who functioned as designed — Joe exhibited not one, but two processing paths, cross-referencing each other and sharing the data he collected in the course of his daily functioning. He was not a simple sensory simulator, reacting without thought: he had points of internal reference with which to compare and contrast his experiences. He was far below David's level of functioning, but he did possess a type of consciousness, a quality of reflection that Hobby, expert in robotics that he was, detected within minutes of sitting down with Joe and starting a conversation with him.   
  
That, and the way Joe kept asking after David with an intensity that no lover-robot should have exhibited toward anything other than seeking his next customer, convinced Hobby that he must not be destroyed as the authorities were demanding. It had taken only a small fraction of his personal assets to pay for the lost amphibicopter, pay off Joe's former owner, and make the legal paperwork filed against the mecha go away. When he'd told Joe what he'd done the robot had cocked his head and gazed at Hobby for a long moment — but had not asked why. At the time he'd written this off as the incuriosity of a limited mind faced with something beyond its purview, but time had taught him to view Joe in a rather different light.  
  
Time, in fact, had taught him to appreciate what lay hidden within the clockwork mechanisms of a machine designed and built entirely to satisfy human lust. Time had taught him to gaze into Joe's bright eyes and see thought, and memory, and critical evaluation, and concepts that were downright revolutionary. He should have expected as much after hearing Joe's discourse to David on the subject of mecha/orga relations, but living with him day to day, seeing how he approached everything new that was put in front of him and questioning him about it afterwards as they lay together in the warm night, Hobby had been faced with another reality that was difficult to process: that when he gazed at Joe, Joe was gazing back at him.   
  
What they saw in each other was, perhaps, more similar than it was dissimilar.   
  
What they saw in each other was David.   
  
And seeing that similarity, sharing those memories, knowing that he was not alone in his sense of loss and regret, Hobby had learned to love where love, according to common sense and esoteric expertise and sanity itself, should have found no ground to take root.  
  
But Joe, bringing grace and beauty to Hobby's life with every word and movement, had probably always broken the rules that should have bound him to his preordained role. And thus the dollmaker had fallen in love with his doll, and there came a time when Hobby found that grief held less space in his heart than joy.  
  
********************************  
  
It was never meant to last.   
  
The first anomalies, standing out even in Joe's unusual profile, showed up during a routine six-month maintenance check. Looking at them on a screen, seeing their spikes like infant thorns nestling in a profusion of roses, Hobby had felt the first chill of cold dread creep down his spine. He was the world's expert on this subject and he had no idea what he was looking at — he only knew that if it got worse, it would spell the end of everything.  
  
For a while Joe had been unaffected — on the outside. But Hobby, running neuronal scans every two days, could see the deterioration accelerating, and when Joe began to talk about David again, intermittently at first, then more and more compulsively, he'd begun to suspect the nature of the horror he was facing. The mirroring process paths that made Joe special and unique, and so enthralling to his human owner, had developed a deadly resonance concerning anything to do with the data trace "David": all of Joe's processor power was being drawn into the increasing obsession, and the strain was tearing his rudimentary mind apart.  
  
And there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that Hobby could to do stop it.  
  
So he stayed with Joe, and he held him and caressed him to satisfy the lover-robot's sensuality subroutines to the full, and he listened to him, and he discussed again and again everything they knew about the lost child robot. And when Joe at last fell silent, his emerald gaze losing focus and all his attention turning utterly inward, Hobby had taken his lovely face in both hands, and kissed him tenderly one last time, and tried to deny the way his heart was shattering, falling in a shower of velvet petals at their feet.   
  
********************************  
  
And now all that was left was the vigil, held for two loves — one lost, one dying. He had discussed the human concept of life after death with Joe on several occasions before the shadow had fallen across their shared lives, and been pleased with the mecha's curiosity and the subtlety of his understanding. It seemed, now, an irony only slightly more cruel than any other.  
  
When had he taken Joe's hand? He didn't remember. It didn't matter. He leaned closer, breathing in the sweet scent of the creature he'd taken for his lover, unable to resist the way it further fractured his already weary heart.  
  
"Take me with you," he whispered into that perfect ear, into the silence of non-breath broken only by the subliminal hum of inaudible electricity. He was not surprised when Joe didn't answer —  
  
— not with words. The slightest increase in pressure on his fingers startled him, racing through his nervous system like a thunderbolt. When he opened his eyes and pulled back Joe turned his head to face him, and there was  _presence_  in those brilliant eyes now, shining like the moon in the heart of the darkest night. A final flare of light before the descent into cold oblivion.  
  
"Allen," Joe murmured, his voice as soft as a dove, and he reached up with his free hand and curved it smoothly around the nape of his owner's neck. The delicate lines of his eyebrows rose fractionally as he posed his last question: "Do you want to come with me? Really?"  
  
Hobby nodded without hesitation. He reached up with his free hand and laid it against Joe's cheek, savouring the warmth of the artificial skin, more flawless than the finest silk.   
  
"Yes, Joe," he said, and leaned forward enough to kiss those lips as soft as rose petals, fully aware of the cold strong metal concealed beneath. "I'm tired… so very, very tired. Please. Don't leave me here alone."  
  
The mecha smiled, a pretty clever toy granted, by inexplicable Fate, the illusion of life and the simulacrum of a heart. Hobby closed his eyes in willing surrender, and just before that exquisitely powerful hand broke his neck he dared to hope that love would find him again, in whatever unknown country lay on the other side of despair.  
  
THE END


End file.
